It's tough when the title character in a movie is computer generated. How do you make him seem real to the audience, especially when that character is an animal?

The answer, to Joe Letteri, senior visual effects supervisor on Peter Jackson's remake of "King Kong," was simple: study live gorillas and use their actions to give your main character behavior that is as close to real as possible, according to SciFi Wire.

"We looked at thousands of photos and hours and hours of video footage," Letteri said during a promotional news conference. "Andy Serkis (who created the computer-generated King Kong) got to spend a week in Rwanda with the mountain gorillas and brought back some amazing footage. We just talked about gorillas a lot. There was so much that we learned about them that we really wanted to bring to the screen. Probably the most important thing was that we wanted Kong to be a creature whose thoughts you could understand, or at least believe you could understand. But we didn't want him to be a man in the suit."

Letteri said that this was a difficult process because gorillas' faces can show a wide range of expressions. "They look so much like us that you could look at them and think, 'I know what he's thinking.' But you really don't," he said. "And that's the line that we were always trying to walk: that you had this creature, who was still a wild creature, thrust into this situation. But we needed to know that you could empathize with him, that you could understand what was happening to him, whether or not he understood it. That was also important, because animals live so much in the moment. They are not aware of what's about to happen to them. So that was really important to the character, that we could keep that emotional state believable as much as possible."

In related news, Peter Jackson, who started work on "King Kong" immediately following the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, said he wants to take some time off.

"We got to get through this and take time off and write some scripts, basically," Jackson said in an interview. "Next year we're going to rest. I can't begin to describe how tired I am, you know?"

So much of the last ten years have been spent by Jackson on either the "Rings" films and "King Kong" that Jackson said he looks at the latter as "a fourth Lord of the Rings film."

Why did Jackson go straight into another movie after the successful "Rings" films? "It just seemed crazy not to, in the sense that we had this incredibly well-oiled pipeline down there in New Zealand for doing big, complicated visual-effects films," he said. "And we were able to keep everybody on board. During the year that we did the post-production on "Return of the King," we were doing animatics or animated storyboards for "King Kong," like the tyrannosaurus fight. And then we were immediately able to finish off the miniatures on "Return of the King" and start shooting the jungle shots for the "King Kong" T. Rex fights with the miniature team."

Now that the film is about to be released, Jackson said, "We haven't really stopped working in seven or eight years, and so next year I'm going to read some books and watch some movies and then also think of new ideas. I mean, one of the things I'm most looking forward to next year is being able to think of something new."

"It's been 10 years of my life where I had two projects that I've been working on: "King Kong" and "Lord of the Rings." That's a long, long time to be just thinking about two particular projects," he said. "I'm just so much looking forward to next year, having the freedom to recharge the batteries and just think of fun ideas for the future."

"King Kong" debuts in theaters on Wednesday, Dec. 14.